Hi first post here, I’ve crewed for all four of the Auckland landings from Crucible and I’m planning to make up a character to join in later on this year. My thoughts is to go in the fighter direction. I would like to be able to do lots of running around all day, so picking armour which is lightweight and flexible is important to me. My budget is limited too.
Going with leather armour seems like the obvious choice here. As it is light, flexible, easy to make, and cheap (if I’m going with the pseudo fake leather looking stuff). And as I’ll be starting out with medium armour that means leather would be appropriate for it, but as I’m going down the fighter path I’m sure it won’t be long until I’ll be upgrading… and for heavy breastplate it must be metal armour. So ideally my medium breastplate should be “metal” too? That way when I upgrade in game, I can keep on using the same piece of kit (I assume this ok?) without needing to build two sets of armour.
Looking around online all options seem to either look incredibly cheap (such as those Halloween costumes, which are nothing more than a picture of armour printed over on top of a long sleeved cotton top) or are incredibly expensive!
So I’m settling on making my own, specifically going with making scale armour. (but I’m remaining very open to other suggestions! Throw your ideas at me!)
Getting some parts of it pre made would speed up the process considerably, and from researching online this looks like this is the cheapest place to go to (anything cheaper we can access here in NZ? Unfortunately shipping kills us!):
theringlord.com/cart/shopdispla … .asp?id=84
Using the small black plastic scales looks attractive to me (wish they had large ones however! Would be faster to assemble. Additionally for Anodized Aluminum the large scales are much cheaper per square foot of coverage than the Anodized Aluminum small scales, at US$19.96 vs US$37.07/sq.ft), because the small black plastic scales are cheap-ish & they’d be lighter than the normal metal ones. If I spray paint them roughly with a metallic coating they could shape up nicely indeed.
I estimate 2 square feet on each side of me will be more than generous enough to cover my front and back (and most probably enough to cover my sides too, but planning on just putting a couple of leather straps on each side to tighten it up. This will make it more adjustable depending on the user’s size, as well as making it lighter, cheaper, and faster to build. All good things!). So 4 square feet in total, means 4000 scales are needed, which is four boxes @ US$13.50 for a total of US$54. This is a shipping weight of 1.8lbs (nice! Means the armour is going to be quite light I think), and a shipping cost of US$12.24 to get it to my YouShop address in the USA. I’d estimate it would then cost NZ$22 to get it from the YouShop warehouse to my doorstep in Auckland.
So in total for all this it would cost NZ$101 I estimate, plus a little bit more for miscellaneous costs of assembly (straps/buckles/cloth/thread). Somewhat more pricey than I’d like, but is still kinda acceptable to me at a stretch.
Then there is the question of attaching all the scales, I wonder if simply sewing it straight onto the backing material is sufficient to hold up during LARP combat? As I don’t want to have to replace dozens of little scales after every encounter! Maybe use strong fishing line instead of thread?
So anyway, that is my thoughts, any feedback on this, be it positive or negative, I’m keen to hear